Mitral valve repair – a marvel of modern medicine

Imagine that there was a dual-pump system with a number of check-valves necessary for you to live. Furthermore, imagine that one of the valves was leaking causing exhaustion, coughing blood and possibly death. This is what medical professionals refer to as Mitral valve regurgiation, or leaking of the mitral valve. The mitral valve is the valve in your heart that, when functioning properly, ensures that oxygenated blood from the lungs is not pumped back into the lungs but to the rest of the body (including the heart itself).

Repairing this valve appears very difficult due to its continued operation being an apparant necessity for the pasients survival, yet it not operating is a necessity for making changes to it. So do surgeons murder their pasients to get ideal circomstances for the surgery or do they operate on a moving valve? Well yes and no. If the task of pumping and oxygenating of blood is delagated to a machine, then the valve doesn’t have to work, while the pasient stays alive without a pulse during the surgery. It’s magnificently advanced yet decently safe.

Here’s to what we as a species has achieved, and what we will bring to the co-fortune of our co-beings!